The Sixteenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

As a college instructor and Chair of the Borough of Manhattan Community College English Department Library and Technology Committee, I am aware that technology is revolutionizing the ways we access, store, use, and share information. This, in turn, changes the needs and practices of readers and library users, particularly in colleges and universities. In addition to their traditional roles, academic librarians currently face the challenge of assisting students in becoming proficient in navigating and evaluating electronic sources. To address this challenge some librarians and instructors choose to collaborate to fulfill students’ needs for quality information, as well as to provide students with adequate instruction on how to find and evaluate this information. At the workshop session, I will discuss my experiences in librarian-instructor collaboration and present specific models of such collaboration. I will showcase examples of academic librarians working together with college instructors to assist students with their research assignments. I will also provide an example of how academic librarians and college instructors can collaborate to organize college-wide informational sessions. The goal of this workshop session I am proposing is to show how instructors and librarians can aid students to become savvy readers of electronic information by forming a partnership in which they combine their separate fields of academic expertise.